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The world of the drug addict

Gilberto Di Petta

Gilberto Di Petta

The world of the drug addict

Drug addiction undermines intentional consciousness. Whereas in normal consciousness we have a fluid intentionality and our common sense is the obviously pre-reflexive result of this situation, under the influence of a drug intoxication we lose this intentional stability and, as a consequence, suffer from a kind of intentional instability, which we can refer to with the term floating world. This floating world is characterized by splitting, vibration and a multiplication of images which can be both sequential or overlapping. On the other hand, following chronic drug assumption, we have a sort of an intentional dramatic capture or seizure of the world, which we can call frozen world. Lived time, space, the body and other existential parameters differ enormously in these two contrasting ways of being. The crisis of the temporal-spatial vortex eventually and inevitably leads to the blow of the void (le coup de vide): the experience of unreality or no self-experience. The total collapse of the world is the common final result of the breaking down of the temporal and spatial structure of Dasein.